Open vs. Fauxpen

Tristan Louisgives weight to new term that I like a lot: fauxpen. Faux in French means "false" or "fake". So fauxpen means fake open. There has always been a lot of that going around, but since the world of tech inevitably contains more of everything, there's more fauxpen stuff than ever. In his post Tristan issues a fresh warning about some of what he calls "a venus flytrap of technology". His definitions:

Fauxpenness: Calling a system or platform open while it is, when more closely scrutinized, under the tight control of its provider.

Fauxpen system (or fauxpen platform): a system or platform that claims to be open but, upon closer examination, isn’t.

The term fauxpen has been around at least a few months. FauxpenSource.org consists entierely of this text:

Main Entry: fauxpen sourcePronunciation: \fō-pən sȯrs\

Function: nounEtymology: a term invented by Phil Marsosudiro at a dinner party in North CarolinaDate: 2 May 2009

A description of software that claims to be open source, but lacks the full freedoms required by the Open Source Definition.

Tristan's scope of history goes back farther. Speaking of lock-in, he writes,

In 2006-2007, we saw that happen with SecondLife, as many developers (myself included) built software code that could run within the SecondLife world but was ultimately stuck there because you could not run it outside that world and/or run SecondLife servers on your own machines.

in 2007-2008, we saw that happen with the F8 Facebook platform, which locks your applications inside of Facebook and, while many developers have pushed to force the company to open up, tends to stay there. In 2007-today, we’re seeing the same thing with Twitter, which allows you to build whatever you want on top of it but doesn’t decentralize their approach, leaving developers potential slaves to the whims of the company. The same is true of the iPhone, which provides unusual access to the phone operating system and allows to develop interesting software on top of it but still keep developers away from being able to access basic things like calendar information via an SDK.

In fact it's been going on approximately forever. There is a propensity in human nature to be, as Walt Whitman perfectly put it, "demented with the mania of owning things". Think of Frodo at the top of Mount Doom, his mind corrupted by the power of the One Ring he was bound by oath to toss into the pool of lava in the mountain's caldera. Tossing it would free the world from the dark lord Sauron. Keeping it would corrupt the bearer and diminish to nothing the strength of free peoples. Frodo, as good a guy as ever lived in literature, succumbs. He is demented with the mania of owning the ring. (But yes, the ring is destroyed, anyway. Thus endeth this digression.)

Now we live in an age when evidence of openness' productive power abounds beyond the verge of ubiquity, it seems like every well-funded inventor of a popular new system still feels the need to force user dependency through proprietary lock-ins. As Tristan points out, we see this today with Twitter. To take metaphorical liberties with what Dave Winer has been writing about -- and working on -- lately, Twitter's One Ring is URL shortening. Staying locked into bit.ly is a losing strategy for Twitter, Dave says. It's a single point of failure, like the o-ring on the Shuttle Challenger.

That last one includes real hacking, about which Dave concludes, "Bottom-line: I am now using URL-shorteners in a way that does not make the Internet suck". Open, not fauxpen.

In his post Tristan points back to Dave's Twitter as coral reef posting from more than two years ago, and a follow-up post from earlier this year, the two expressing Dave's initial embrace of twitter, and then his decision to break out of Twitter's lock-in. What Tristan misses (and I think this is just an oversight), is the work Dave and others (especially in Identi.ca / Laconica) have been doing to free microblogging (or whatever it is that Twitter does) from fauxpeness.

By the way, owning things is not bad. In fact, it can be very good. Without it, we wouldn't have a working economy, much less economic growth. But it's still not plain to most people, including many who one would think ought to know better, that opening up infrastructure is the best way to make money in the long run, because there's more on which to build one's tech and one's business. Here in 2009 hardly a week goes by when I don't hear somebody ask "How can you make money with something that's free?" The answer is, you make money because of it, not with it. How much money is being made today because of Linux? The sum is incalculable. Start with Google and Amazon and multiply from there.

Back to fauxpeness. Take a look at what Tristan says about "The API cycle". Yes, we do want APIs to be open and useful. But we also want independence and free agency for everybody in a given category's ecosystem. I fear that some APIs -- especially ones that lock us into dependency on commercial intermediaries that may fail -- are also a breed of fauxpen. And we'll learn big lessons about that as soon as some big commercial tree on which millons depend -- one with an "open API" -- fails to grow to the sky.

What do the rest of ya'll think?

To help with that, here's a bonus link from Adriana Lukas at The Mine! Project. And a bonus quote from that post: "What with FriendFeed selling out to Facebook, the less those of us who have been harping on about user autonomy, self-hosted or user-owned apps and technology look like online equivalent of survivalists."

"opening up infrastructure is the best way to make money in the long run, because there's more on which to build one's tech and one's business."

If Infrastructure had to be "open" and "free", we wouldn't have clean water to drink, electricity to power our computers, or sewers to take our waste away -- not to mention the fact I'd have to have a million different adapters to make anything work. There is an economic investment required to build infrastructure... it has to be paid for -- either by a government through taxes, or by a company through revenues.

It's a wonderful notion that software somehow defies this model, but one would assume the folks who work at Twitter would like to be compensated for their work -- even if what they're building is considered "infrastructure" by everyone else. The problem is, the only way to get people to actually pay for software is to either 1) Hook it to an adjacent business model (like consulting/Support in the case of RedHat, or Advertising in the case of Google) or 2) Make it a closed ecosystem (like Facebook or iPhone).

If you're a software developer hoping to be paid for making software, you really don't have a choice... shareware doesn't put food on the table in most cases.

Which is better for the software industry -- to have profitable and sustainable software companies who can invest in R&D, one trick ponies beholden to a business model other than software, or "starving artists" barely able to eat, much less invest in building better products? (The answer: you need some of all of them)

(Full disclosure - I work for Microsoft... but only after Novell laid me off because they couldn't afford to pay me anymore).

I honestly hope this word doesn't stick. There's no need for apparently made up words, especially when that matter in question isn't exactly new concept. Closed systems with APIs are there since forever.

One other thing - attribution of Google and Amazon success to Linux (How much money is being made today because of Linux? The sum is incalculable. Start with Google and Amazon and multiply from there.)is false. Google came up with a novel advertising technique and Amazon has an Internet shop that people actually like. In both cases Linux is just a tool, and not the only one that makes such things possible. Business idea in both cases is not Linux. And neither makes their core technology reproducible by other parties. Closed? You bet.

First of all, thanks for the shout-out. The great work that Dave an others have done around microblogging in general and twitter in particular is not just an oversight on my part but part of the issue I have with fauxpenness. Developers get lured in by API and provide a lot of added value to existing system but, if the system is fauxpen, they inevitably end up getting tricked into doing all that work for someone who turns out to have intentions other than friendly. So my intent in overlooking that when writing about it was not so much as a dig to those folks that do brilliant work around fauxpen systems but rather because tis a bit of a shame that they (we) get caught into expanding energy on things that turn out to be broken.